This work focuses on the characterization of fully inorganic perovskite thin films with CsPbBr3 composition. Good reproducibility of both composition and properties of the CsPbBr3 films was achieved using different growth routes based on thermal evaporation of precursors (PbBr2, CsBr, CsPbBr3-single crystal). It was studied the impact of the growth route (co-evaporation, sequential evaporation and evaporation of CsPbBr3-single crystal) on the optical, structural and morphological properties of the thin films by transmittance, photocurrent, photoluminescence, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements. This study made it possible to find conditions to prepare single phase CsPbBr3 films suitable for the manufacture of stable perovskite solar cells. An efficiency of 5.6% was achieved with solar cells manufactured with FTO/TiO2/CsPbBr3/P3HT/Au architecture.

This article presents details of the design, construction and operation of a low cost reactor for growth of thin films of Chalcogenide Materials used for Photovoltaic applications. This reactor allows growing any type of chalcogenide compound by chalcogenisation of their metal precursors. However its performance was tested by depositing CuSbS2 films by chalcogenisation of metal precursors sequentially deposited by evaporation. The sulfurization process includes soft annealing of the Sb/Cu stacked precursor in a controlled atmosphere mixture of argon and hydrogen gas (95% Ar and 5% H2) followed by heating in the presence of elemental sulfur, using a tubular furnace heated with infrared lamps. Chalcogenisation process is carried out by controlling the heating rate of the furnace with the help of algorithms developed using LabVIEW programming environment. Through a study of deposition parameters that included the variables, furnace heating rate, final annealing target temperature and annealing time, conditions were found to grow single-phase CuSbS2 films with good structural, optical and morphological properties. This indicates that the CuSbS2 films prepared by means the chalcogenisation routine developed in this work, could be used later as an absorbent layer in solar cells.

This paper reports results of a study on the impact that the synthesis method and the replacement of the methylammonium (MA) cation by the formamidinium (FA) cation have on both morphology and degradation of MAPbI3 (MAPI) films when these are exposed to environmental conditions.This study was conducted with samples deposited using different routes based on growth methods both in solution and thermal evaporation, including one step spin coating and two-steps new growth routes where in a first step a layer of PbI2 is deposited by conventional evaporation and then a second layer of MAI (methylammonium iodide) is deposited by dipping and CSS (close spaced sublimation) methods respectively.The study revealed that the stability of MAPI films is significantly improved when are deposited using the two-steps synthesis routes. Evidence was found explaining that this behavior could be attributed to the fact that this type of MAPI films, grow with large grain sizes and low density of native and structural defects, characteristics that lead to a reduction of the ionic migration initiated in grain boundaries regions, where the degradation process generally begins.